Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Hosting Security and Technology : Listing installed software on a server

[Ulysses]

Hi,

What is the best way to get a list of all the software installed on a Linux server? Are there specific shell commands for this?

Thanks

[jon-f]

not really for all the software, for hosting if you wanna show what software you got there is a few sysinfo scripts and for php related phpinfo.

if you are on redhat based distro you can list all rpms installed. But that isnt all software most of the time if you have things compiled in or installed some other way
rpm -qa

[derek.bodner]

What distribution?

rpm -qa on a redhat/centos server is a good start (although won't help you with compiled software).

[twhiting9275]

What is the best way to get a list of all the software installed on a Linux server?

Impossible.

Yes, RPM can help, as can any "packaging utility", but most likely that's not going to give you what you're looking for specifically. You can START with RPM, but you're going to need to narrow that down quite a bit, because RPM usually (usually) won't cover things such as perl modules, outsourced stuff, web applications (billing client, etc) and other stuff.

[david510]

Ulysses,

What softwares you wish to see? User specific or system specific?

[Ulysses]

Originally Posted by derek.bodner

What distribution?

rpm -qa on a redhat/centos server is a good start (although won't help you with compiled software).

Good point. Actually it's a CentOS 4. I should have mentioned that.

[Ulysses]

Originally Posted by david510

Ulysses,

What softwares you wish to see? User specific or system specific?

System specific, so we can have the client's new dedicated server setup just like the server we built the script. The idea is to ensure that the whole site can be migrated with as little trouble as possible.

Thanks

[david510]

If you have the OS installed on the new server with the same release and version all softwares should be there. Now, there may be addon like firewall installs, other security installs such as mod_sec etc. To find out those, you must go through the main configurations files on the old server. There is no single step procedure to find out these kind of installs.

[Woooo]

I can recommend you to install webmin for managing the box. It have an option which shows all modules available on a machine.

[alrhost]

I think it's impossible to list all software installed on server

but if you installed a fresh copy of OS then why don't you read about that OS

[kgs_namboothiri]

Hi,

You can use rpm -qa for this.If you want redirect this to a file then you can use as...
# rpm -qa >filename

[Ulysses]

Thanks for all the suggestions. I think we have managed to get enough information to set up the new server as closely as posible to the current one, so hopefully, the site/scripts will migrate without too much fuss.

Thanks again.

PS. Wouldn't it be nice of someone coded a script just for such a thing and added it to (say) WHM etc.

[david510]

PS. Wouldn't it be nice of someone coded a script just for such a thing and added it to (say) WHM etc.

Well, it is really difficult. Different OS has different kind of softwares and installs. Also the addons on a live server varies with the performance tuning on the server. Some requires addons for apache, some need addons for mysql etc. So a generalized situation cannot be achieved.